


stiff

by TomBowline



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Era, Class Differences, Dirty Talk, Fantasizing, Hickey’s Elaborate Sexual Fantasies, Intercrural Sex, Loneliness, M/M, Resurrection Men, i do not know how to tag this relationship, lonely rich spinster/handsome scheming servant but they’re both huge bitches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:48:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29700792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: The young man - the gardener - the charity case, as Goodsir’s brother had once called him in a voice of great fatigue - had been in Goodsir’s employ for some months now.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	stiff

**Author's Note:**

> Extra warnings for thoughts of surgery and pissing and talk of hangings within the context of sexual fantasy.

“You look drawn, Doctor Goodsir. Is the work straining you?”

Goodsir looked up from where he had a dormouse tacked open on the specimen table to see his erstwhile gardener leaning against the cluttered chaise at the far end of the room - looking, it must be said, utterly free of strain himself. He glanced at the clock on the far wall; it was not half past two. A new record, then. The man had done less than an hour of work before coming in to pluck at Goodsir’s coattails. 

“Don’t you have something to be gardening, Mr Hickey?”

Hickey snorted. “Oh, great and grandiose visions, doctor. All,” he sighed melodramatically, “inoperable until the next garden show, I’m afraid.”

The young man - the gardener - _the charity case,_ as Goodsir’s brother had once called him in a voice of great fatigue - had been in Goodsir’s employ for some months now. He was a good enough gardener, if a bit strange in his working habits (he dragged his feet almost all day, barely doing anything, but only because he preferred - Goodsir was given to understand - to do most of his work in the night-time), and he had transformed the barren waste of Goodsir’s small lot with feats of labor that seemed beyond his slight frame and stringy-soft muscles. The trouble was not with his work, unusual as it may have been - all the ruin lay in what would inevitably follow when he retired for the day. 

He had insinuated himself into Goodsir’s company with such gradual deference at first. _Could I beg a cup of water, doctor, it’s wretched hot today,_ and such - and of course Goodsir had invited him in, had bade him sit down, had not wished to appear supercilious. Now he was stuck in deep as a thorn, and Goodsir was too much bound by the torpid complacency of having someone to hold, no matter how thorny, to try and pry him out. The house did get awfully large when he was on his own in it. 

“Mmm.” Goodsir turned back to his dormouse, preparing to peel back a section of skin with his scalpel to get a better look at its minuscule musculature. “I don’t pay you to call me that, you know.”

Hickey snorted again - perhaps snorted was the wrong word. Nothing so plainly perceivable as that. Just a little huff, a little shake of the shoulders and a rotten sort of twinkle in his eyes. “Would you like to pay me _not_ to call you it?” 

Goodsir stared at him flatly; said nothing. He noticed, eyes drifting downwards, that Hickey had tracked mud onto the carpet - another little push, just to see whether Goodsir would open his mouth about it. 

In the silence, Hickey smiled and stepped closer, catlike, through the obstacle course of empty terrariums and tomes on biology. At last he came to rest sidled up next to Goodsir at the table, chin to jaw, clammy mouth to ear. “Very good, doctor.”

Goodsir sighed and turned back to his work, but Hickey tweaked his sleeve - like an insolent child, Goodsir thought in somewhat frenzied annoyance - to bring his attention back. 

“How would you like to play a game, doctor?” His voice was baldly conniving, his mouth curled up like a cat’s tail. He leant against the side of the specimen table, twisting his neck to address Goodsir with the full weight of his unaccountably arresting gaze. “I think there’s something terribly wrong with me just—” A pointed and thumbing caress, perhaps just possible to miss the meaning of if one happened to be both blind and deaf. “Here. May need a surgeon’s care.”

Goodsir briefly entertained the possibility of pressing Hickey to the table and palpating his slender pink prick with clinical detachment until it went off into his hand. Then, rather less briefly, he thought of the more common meaning taken by _a surgeon’s care_ \- what it would be like to have Hickey under his knife, quivering and grunting into a spit-soaked rag. Some men’s bladders failed them when the cut was made - from pure animal shock or a more conscious fear, Goodsir didn’t know. It had always shamed him to witness, before; to see it on Hickey, he thought, might be nothing so much as gratifying. 

He turned back once more to the tiny ball of viscera before him, part unwilling to give Hickey the satisfaction of knowing what his thoughts tended towards and part pathetically afraid that he might somehow be disgusted and take his leave forever. Something to celebrate, surely; and yet. “I’m working, Mr Hickey,” he pointed out in his best clipped professorial tone. “And you are dirtying my rug.”

“Alright.” Hickey set his elbows against the table’s edge, apparently thinking. He didn’t seem to have to think long: “Different game, then. You’re a little surgeon at the college, I’m a resurrection man come to deliver my goods.”

“Lord, no.” Goodsir frowned without looking up. “Nothing much in that, anyway, is there?”

“Why not? You used to be one, I used to be the other.”

Goodsir stammered fitfully, incensed by the flippancy of it all. Yes, he had been a surgeon once - a _doctor,_ even, as Mr Hickey was so fond of saying. He’d been struck off not two years ago (with the knowledge that he was damned lucky not to be jailed for it) for helping to bring several young women out of _trouble,_ and had come in exile to this house, a disused property of his uncle’s - where he had acquired a slight and snotty gardener whom he sensed was also in some state of banishment, though from what he did not know. Now the only things he took a scalpel to were birds and beasts; he did the vital medical work of furthering human understanding of the properties of animals every day while knowing he could never take his research to its terminus by actual human study. All this fuss and misery, boiled down succinctly by the nasty little man who was making eyes at him from across his gore-strewn table as _used to be._

Hickey was evidently choosing to take his silence for confusion. “Come now, Doctor. Did you never enjoy yourself?”

“There is nothing,” Goodsir sniped, rounding on Hickey with his scalpel in hand - which made Hickey smile a curious little smile like was conducting an experiment himself and liked the results he was getting - _“enjoyable_ about taking receipt of pilfered cadavers, Mr Hickey.”

Hickey sneered. “It’s not as if diggin’ them up’s any nicer, is it? Don’t do the job for fun, sawbones.” His accent was roughening, something about his manner shifting and slouching - he was going to play this game, it seemed, with or without Goodsir. “Though I do like to see if they had anything nice on them. Silly what people have buried with them, innit? Can’t take it with you, no point in being stingy with it, I say.” He shrugged and gestured through this little speech as if it were the most natural supposition in the world. And Goodsir was drawn to it, somehow - not the message itself, but the intensity with which it was delivered. Sure-moving lips biting off each word with perfect poise, bright staring eyes and minute emphasizing movements made stronger by their smallness. If only he didn’t make such a spectacle of his incivility every time, perhaps Goodsir would be more inclined to indulge him. It was alright to feel such things, to a point - it was another thing entirely to speak them aloud like you were proud of it. But then again, what was it that thrilled him so about Hickey, if not that he did seem somehow proud of those more savage tendencies?

“No,” Hickey continued, shaking his oily hair loose to curl about his ears and jaw as he bobbed his head in no particular direction. “The fun comes after. That’s if you know how to come by it, see. ‘Cause I’ve got a stiff for you, hmm?” He grinned a grin that on someone else might be playfully saucy; on Hickey’s pinched crescent-moon face it was more like a threat. He advanced on Goodsir, stepping into his space until their shoes interlaced. Bright black leather and dusty brown hide, dizzying on the red moth-eaten carpet. 

“And it’s a crime, we both know it is. And I see you lookin’ at me, the way men like us do.” Hickey tucked his mouth into Goodsir’s ear again and breathed out hot and clammy. Goodsir thought, like the desperate kick of a dying rabbit, of how much he’d always disliked the resurrectionists. Especially the ones who seemed to savor the job. He bet Mr Hickey had been one of those lot, in his time. 

“And since we’re in this deep already— Well. What’s one more misdeed?” Hickey’s hand, a little slip of a thing, worming down to pluck at Goodsir’s fly, then right in the side - damn his old fall-front trousers, damn him for mending everything to oblivion rather than replacing any of his clothes - and through the slit in his smallclothes to grasp his prick. 

Goodsir spared one final, despairing glance at his dissection. Perhaps later in the day. 

“There,” Hickey crooned. His voice was making some mockery of gentleness, still unshakably lascivious at the edges, as he dropped Goodsir’s trouser-front and drew out his prick. He whistled, long and low and ridiculous, as if this were the first time he’d seen the thing. “It’s a proud tool you have, doctor. I’m not having that up me for anything.” He peeled the foreskin back and squeezed it up together, pumped the firming length a few times experimentally - Goodsir swore quietly and jiggled his leg against the dry friction. “No time for that, anyway. I’ll settle for a frig, or you can take it between your thighs if you’d rather.” 

“I—” Goodsir rolled his eyes, trying to focus, trying to resist stamping a foot from the almost intentionally torturous way Hickey was pulling him off. He didn’t see the point, himself, in pretending they were in some dingy alley when they had a nice soft sofa and sunlight streaming in and plenty of time for a proper fuck. “Yes, that would be best. The— second option.” 

Hickey hummed as if amused - perhaps he was. Goodsir always detected something near-mocking in Hickey’s demeanor when he volunteered for the passive role, though the active was clearly Hickey’s preference. The shame would transfer, ruddy and clinging, onto Goodsir as they fucked and leave him with a pleasant sort of stomach-churning glow. “Don’t want to get your hands dirty, doctor? That’s fine. You look as if you’ve soft thighs, anyway. Are they as hairy as your face is?” 

He couldn’t hold back a dry little chuckle. Hickey knew full well what the insides of his thighs looked like. “Not quite, but close,” he said, redundantly, for Hickey had already got behind him and taken down his trousers and smalls to the knee. 

“Oh, yes.” Hickey took the flesh of Goodsir’s thigh in one hot little vise of a hand and pried it apart from its twin until Goodsir could feel the faint play of still afternoon air over his softest skin. “You’ll do nicely.” 

The next thing he felt was oil, loose and warmish from where it had presumably been tucked up close to Hickey’s body, rubbed in between his thighs with no regard for the mess it made. He expected that he would be finding spots of grease on his trouser-legs that evening, when he was sat alone in the dark with his tea and his candle and his headache, and that he would feel a wretched empty regret for having taken part in this little farce. For the moment, though, he leaned his elbows onto the specimen-table and looked out the broad window into the garden Hickey had made for him - the climbing roses smothering the shed, the rows of gladiolus all colorful and fragrant and fit to pierce the heavens - and let himself be pushed, prodded, dug out like the dirt for Hickey’s pleasure. 

Not just Hickey’s pleasure, the insistent pulse of his prick reminded him. He closed his hand around it as Hickey shoved his own prick into the tense crease of his thighs, and the dual sensation jolted through him like the fizzing happiness of liquor, shocking and buoyant and ill-advised. Given and taken, fucking and fucked. 

“Oh, that is nice,” Hickey groaned, chin hooked onto his shoulder to gaze down at Goodsir’s prick as he set up a rhythm. “You bend over for everyone who brings a body by?” Goodsir gritted his teeth and hissed as Hickey closed his hand over Goodsir’s own on his prick, pushed a thumb under his foreskin and rubbed at his slit. “That why they have you here to receive, is it, ‘cause they know how good you are for it?” 

Goodsir grunted, shook his head, bucked up; Hickey only hummed as he kept up the tandem rub of his length between Goodsir’s thighs and his hand around Goodsir’s length. “Course they don’t,” he drawled. “’Cause if they did you wouldn’t get a moment away. If anyone else knew you were this tight—” He laughed, a huffy little snickering thing, a wash of warm breath over Goodsir’s exposed neck. “They’d be pumping you full of it night and day. No, I think I’ve discovered you.” Voice light, considering; hand squeezing in dizzying, measured strokes. “Think my prick’s the first one’s been here, hmm?”

Broadly speaking, it wasn’t true. Goodsir had had men before, in all sorts of fumbling and cramped ways; had let them have him, in much the same manner. But it wasn’t a lie, not technically - Hickey had been the first to plunder this particular plane of his body. So— “Yes,” he panted. “Yes - oh. Just you.” 

The minutes dragged by in labored intensity; Goodsir’s hands began to slip sweaty and hot on the edge of the table, his feet began to prickle and ache where he had them planted firm to thrust his hips back against Hickey’s. He felt eminently, meditatively used - a sleeve, a sock, a thing to rut into. He supposed it should make him feel angry, upset, ashamed, but all he came up with as he felt the slippery leak of Hickey’s cock onto his thighs was a twisting, salacious sort of contentment. It was as good a way to spend an afternoon as any - he felt he was of use, needed, wanted, and all that was asked of him was to keep his thighs squeezed tight and let himself be bathed in the golden light of the wide westward window. 

He watched with glazed eyes the shining motes of dust their coupling disturbed, the leaves down below waving in the wind. The nasturtiums in their squat sprawl by the pond were blooming like a ring of fire; the wide circles of dirt that had been churned up for Hickey’s next endeavor were sprouting weeds, insolent and insistent. Soon the ground would be seeded, heavy with fruit, soaked in vital water— 

Hickey grunted and spent in a series of stuttering thrusts, his prick audibly shunting its own built-up essence between Goodsir’s thighs in a parabola of motion - snapping quick and relentless before winding down into lax inaction. His hand squeezed Goodsir’s prick almost painfully as he reached his crisis (it should have made him less eager; it didn’t), but after several moments of high whining breath in Goodsir’s ear Hickey redoubled his efforts to great effect. 

Hickey’s own prick was still clutched softening and sticky between Goodsir’s thighs; his hips pressed close and hot against Goodsir’s arse, his back against Goodsir’s front. With the hand that was not frigging Goodsir’s cock, he reached around and gathered some of his own spend from where it oozed out behind Goodsir’s stones. As he smeared it up the length of Goodsir’s shaft there was a bloom of tacky, vaguely repellant heat, compounding the slick warmth of Hickey’s oiled hand. At the mercy of that light-fingered grasp Goodsir felt himself dangling, squirmy and helpless, on the edge of crisis. 

“You ever see a corpse in this condition? It happens, you know.” He reached one sticky hand up and set it around Goodsir’s throat, squeezing just loosely. “Hanged stiffs in particular. Always got a great fat cockstand. ‘S if it pleased them, somehow.” 

There was no time, in that hazy gasp of a moment, for Goodsir to consider that a ghoul like Hickey had been would have no reason to sell a hanged corpse, that the bodies of criminals were provided to anatomists as a matter of course. There was only the hot press of Hickey’s hand on his windpipe, the hard slick strip of Hickey’s fist over his weeping cock, sending him over to a wave of shameful shocking pleasure. 

Hickey dismounted himself quickly, wiping his hand on the table as he went - Goodsir spared a moment to be grateful it wasn’t his waistcoat being used thus. Before Goodsir could clean up and turn around Hickey had righted himself and moved back across the room. “Thank you, doctor,” he chirped, thumping one hand on the doorframe in his descent back out to the garden. “It’s been most edifying, wouldn’t you say?” 

Goodsir didn’t answer. He snagged a book from far across the table and flipped it open to a random page, wishing to broadcast disinterest. 

In bold black type, the header proclaimed: _Progression of a Corpse - 2 to 6 hours post mortem - Rigor Mortis._

He stared at the page with unseeing eyes and a hot face until he heard the creak of the back-door shutting Hickey out. He still felt clammy between the thighs.


End file.
